Metadata Blog

Networked Resources and Metadata Interest Group
Minutes, January 21, 2007
Seattle

Brian Surratt (Chair) called the meeting to order shortly after 8:00 a.m.
He introduced the officers and explained that the meeting will consist of an informal discussion followed by a business meeting.

The CC:DA Liaison Report was given before the discussion, as Greta de Groat needed to leave for another meeting.
• CC:DA reviewed the draft of a consolidated ISBD. They were a little baffled about what their comments are supposed to be. RDA chapters 6, 7 and 3 comments were submitted.
• Greta mentioned the committee’s “crisis of confidence” about RDA development; they suggested that the Joint Steering Committee do a top-down approach, hire additional staff, use other standards besides AACR2 as models.
• Apparently other countries don’t reflect the concerns of ALA on the JSC.
• Next steps: revise Chapter 3 & part of 4 (March). Chapters 6, 7 June; part B later in year.
• Online draft prototype www.rdaonline.org

Panel Discussion on Issues Related to Metadata Creation and Management
Panelists and their presentations:

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NRMIG members exchanged personal and professional data at Seattle's Palace Kitchen restaurant during ALA Midwinter 2007. After dinner, a subset migrated to nearby Shorty's bar for beer and pinball.

ALCTS CCS Cataloging Norms Discussion Group -- "How Catalogers and System Developers Work Creatively with Metadata"
Washington State Convention & Trade Cent room: Room 615
Saturday, 1/20/2007, 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM

The Cataloging Norms Discussion Group consisted of three separate presentations. First, Terry Reese (Digital Production Unit Head, Oregon State University Libraries) presented “Institutional Repositories: Dspace MARC record generation.” The majority of the presentation discussed MarcEdit, a tool developed by Terry that was developed out of the need to create MARC records from Dublin Core records for electronic student theses. MarcEdit consists of two components: an OAI harvester that resolves character encoding issues and uses XSLT to convert records between Dublin Core and MARC; and a macro engine that looks very much like OML and checks records to filter out subject headings that are not based on LCSH and corrects date and other data formatting differences between the Dublin Core record and MARC requirements. For those institutions that have a need to convert records between metadata schemes, this would be a very good tool to streamline the process and enable staff to work on other projects than records conversion.

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Lorcan Dempsey
Vice President and Chief Strategist, OCLC
“Moving to the network level: discovery and disclosure"
ALCTS 2007 Midwinter Symposium: "Definitely digital: an exploration of the future of knowledge on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of ALCTS"
Jan. 19, 2007

Background:

The digital environment hasn’t merely changed people’s workflow, it has BECOME their workflow. This is true for us librarians, but especially for our patrons.

Our relationship with networked sources is part of that workflow. Hand in hand with unbundling is rebundling (of work processes).

Then: users built their workflow around the library. Now: The library must meet the patron in their workflow.

Then: Resources were scarce, centralized in library, and users’ attention was abundant. Now: Resources are abundant and decentralized, and our users’ attention/time are scarce.

Long tail information providers (like Amazon.com and Google) are successful because of the way that they aggregate the supply of information and resources: unified discovery: low transaction costs (for user). They spend BILLIONS getting into users’ workflow, with toolbars, one-click setups, etc.). And aggregation of demand: mobilizing large numbers of users over a unified set of resources, you DRIVE people down the long tail, ie. provide more information, more resources, in the long run.

How does this apply to libraries?

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